Book award winners

The winners of this year's British Psychological Society book awards have been announced, including books on memory, psychological testing and autism spectrum disorders.

Professor Alan Baddeley won in the popular science category for Working Memories: Postmen, Divers and Cognitive Revolution. The book covers Baddeley's personal recollections from a period after World War II, known as the cognitive revolution, in which ideas from computer science, neuroscience, philosophy and psychology were linked, changing the face of psychological research. 

The winners of the Academic Monograph category were Dr Elisabeth Murray, Dr Steven Wise and Professor Kim Graham for The Evolution of memory systems: Ancestors, anatomy and adaptions. Their book takes a dramatically different approach to the evolution of memory systems in the brain. Rather than classifying brain areas as solely involved with perception or executive function, Murray, Wise and Graham suggest all cortical areas contribute to memory and do so using specialised neural representations.

Dr Colin Cooper (pictured above) won in the Textbook category for Psychological Testing: Theory and Practice. Cooper taught individual differences and psychometrics for 25 years and said he had longed to write a text which gave students both a grasp of psychometrics as well as contrarian viewpoints and more recent developments in the field.

Autism Spectrum Disorder: Characteristics, Causes and Practical Issues by Dr Jill Boucher was initially entered in the Textbook category but was judged as a winner in the Practitioner Text category. This book marks the second, revised, edition of Boucher's 2009 introductory textbook. It includes a historical background of autism, identification, ways to provide education and care for autistic people, and traces the ways autism has been defined and conceptualised over the years.